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San Francisco Travelogue

San Francisco vacationChoose a format:

(Windows Media 10MB) or Flash Video (faster, smaller)
Travelogue video of my trip to San Francisco to observe the ranked choice voting this year. The event was sponsored by
FairVote. We attended pollworker training; met with ranked vote activists
and political leaders who were involved in its passage; heard discussions
by members of the Elections Commission and academics who studied last year's
election; met with city election officials and toured their facility; went
precinct to precinct to talk to voters and pollworkers; and had fun in the
city. The video only touches a little of all that, and to compress it, a
lot of the quality is lost. But you may find it interesting and amusing.
Seven minutes long.

ID AT THE POLLING PLACE?

Democrats accuse Republicans of wanting to suppress the vote. Republicans
accuse Democrats of encouraging fraud. Do they want a solution, or do they
want to stir people up?

A bill that was introduced in the Minnesota Legislature would require voters
to present a photo ID before signing the pollbook and voting. HF1443SF923

Mike McCarthy from the Secretary of State’s office testified in favor
of the bill. He stated that both poll workers and citizens have complained
to their office about the honor system used at the polling places.

I don’t doubt what he says. As an election judge, I have had voters
get angry because we were not checking IDs. Most people that I talk to have
no objection to showing an ID, and many think that ID should be required.

But these are the questions that I did not hear the Secretary’s office
answer:

■ How many voters have come to vote and found that someone else
had impersonated them by signing their name and voting? I’m not talking
about people who accidentally sign the wrong line, but actual evildoers.

■ How many election judges have reported having a
prospective voter claim to be someone whom the election judge happens
to know –someone who is not who he says he is? My experience is that
almost every voter is a neighbor of one of the election judges.

I wish the secretary’s office had some facts and figures about how
often this happens, because it would be very helpful in making an estimate
as to how much voter impersonation actually takes place. Consider how risky
it would be to walk into a polling place and claim to be someone you’re
not. How do you know that the election judge won’t know the person
you are impersonating? Your benefit is one extra vote for your candidate.
Your risk is conviction of a felony and prison. If this happened even 200
times in a major Minnesota election that would be .01% of the votes cast.

To me, voting is like our criminal law system. We would rather allow some
guilty people to go free than to convict an innocent man. And that’s
why juries apply a reasonable doubt standard.

With voting, we would rather have a few improper voters than prevent eligible
people from voting.

Most of us have photo IDs. But a small percentage, maybe 5% of us, do not:
people who don’t drive and don’t have a bank account and would
not need a photo ID except for voting. These people are typically the
elderly, the poor, the disabled. They have as much right to vote as
I do. To make them buy a photo ID just to vote is a poll tax, says
a federal
court in Georgia.
(And see a recent decision in Missouri.) Even if the photo ID fee is waived for the indigent, it’s still a poll
tax. The hermit who lives up in a shack on the mountain and hates the
government and has a stash of money that he inherited from his parents
that he keeps in a mattress and comes down every two years to vote
for the most anti-government candidate on the ballot has as much right
to vote as anyone else and cannot be made to pay a poll tax, even if he can
afford it.

By imposing this photo ID requirement, we would be stifling 2 or 3% of eligible
voters to prevent 1/100 of 1% (if that) from fraudulently impersonating
a real voter.

Still, it’s discomforting to think that someone ineligible could vote
or someone could vote twice by simply claiming to be a person whose
signature line is blank. Recently, a candidate for the Green Party
claimed that 25% of voters believe our President was not properly elected.
He went on to say that whether it was true or not, and even if some
of the non-believers were kooks, the fact that 25% believed it constituted
a crisis.

I agree that we should not have large percentages of our population who
are skeptical about the validity of our elections. There will always
be a paranoid few, but the number of voters who favor an ID requirement
are much more than a few and are certainly not all Republican partisans
trying to stifle minorities from voting.

The objections to photo ID are cost, inconvenience, and intrusion. The federal
court in Georgia, which issued an injunction finding that Georgia’s
photo ID requirement was likely to be found unconstitutional, seemed most
concerned with cost and inconvenience.

Can we come up with an ID process that does not impose a cost on voters
or cause them great inconvenience? Here are a variety of ideas:

■ The voter registration form could include this question: “For
your security, do you want to be asked for your photo ID at the polling place?” If
the voter indicates yes, then the sign-in book at the polling place will
have a notation by that person’s name that an ID should be requested.

■ Prospective voters could be asked for a photo ID. If a voter
does not have a photo ID the poll worker could say: “For the security
of your vote and pursuant to state law, we are required to take your picture
before you sign in.” The poll worker could then take a picture and
log in the name of the voter on a list. If later in the day, a voter could
prove that an earlier person using his name was not him, law enforcement
could refer to the log and the picture to find the impersonator.

■ Electronic pollbooks could contain the picture of the voter.
Recently there was a demonstration of these pollbooks at the State Office
Building. They replace the mounds of paper with voters’ names on them
that are signed on Election Day. All the information on the precinct voters
is loaded into a laptop with the pollbook program. When the voter arrives,
she can produce an ID which is scanned and brings up the voter’s name
and address. If the voter doesn’t have an ID, the poll worker can type
in her name to bring up the record. The voter signs in on an electronic pad
like those in some department stores. It would be simple to upload a photo
of the voter, either at the time of registration or at the time of voting.
Fingerprints could also be used as IDs.

■ Voters could be required to dip a finger in colorful ink as in
Iraq. This would prevent multiple voting. It would also be fun and could
replace those “I Voted” stickers!

You might roll your eyes at some of these ideas, but the point is there
are ways to reassure the public that fraud is not taking place without putting
undue expense or inconvenience on the least fortunate of our voters. It just
takes some creativity.

So let’s put partisanship aside and brainstorm a way to give all voters
confidence that the system is accessible, secure, and fair.

*This site was constructed in 2005 and 2006 and remains up out of a masochistic sense of nostalgia. Copyright 2006 Bruce D. Kennedy